PC gamers tend to be quite attached to their mice and keyboards, but that doesn't mean there's not room for a controller to squeeze in. The Stinky Footboard won't steal away your precious pointer, or replace your keys with a handful of buttons, but it will give you four more, and it puts them right under your feet.

The footboard essentially a giant dpad you throw under your desk, you won't want to actually use it that way. Instead, you might map a heel-press to couch, and map pedal-to-the-metal toe pressure to sprint. And while the footboard only has four physical buttons (no diagonals), it can also handle modifiers like alt, control, and shift, bringing the grand total of foot-commands to 16, if you want.

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We got to spend some foots-on time with an early model, and it seems pretty promising. It takes a little while, but eventually the foot-commands become second nature and the peripheral itself sort of fades away into your sub-conscious. The pad's simple software interface auto-loads command profiles when games boot up, so it's absolutely trivial to customize for different games so you can have FPS commands, MMO macros, and RTS hotkeys. And it even comes with a set of three different springs, so you can tweak the responsiveness as you see fit.

It all comes at a price though. The pad will be available in June for $119 and is making its first appearance at PAX East. Pre-orders are available through (an as-yet-unlaunched) Kickstarter, though units will be available regardless of whether or not the project meets its goal. When you're gaming on a PC, you've got a whole board full of keys, so mapping some to your foot is far from necessary, but if you don't like those fingers straying from WASD where they belong, it'll give you a hand. Well, a foot, but you get the idea.